TR Forums

They are right, we've never stored it. The page is here: https://techreport.com/subscriptions/

Honestly though, I don't know what exactly subs mean right now. They are on my list in the first post as something I'm trying to get clarification on.

Edit: I'm told the sub page and Stripe applet thingy will be working again soon.

layerup wrote:

I have a question, what's with the Facebook/Instagram/Pintrest/Twitter etc icon that scrolls with me on the web pages? This is fairly offputting to me, and I'm curious, does it really serve some useful purpose? I generally associate those icons with websites I wish to not return to, and it seems a shame that it is featured on TechReport, hopefully temporarily.

I second the request for smaller font, at least on the desktop version. This large font is rough to scroll through.

That's so you can be a hip kid and share the article with any of those platforms easily. I, for one, wouldn't be opposed to anyone that wanted to, using a blocker to block those social media buttons, but that's just me. I also think they're annoying.

Glorious wrote:

My recollection was that Morphine explained that such sensitive data was actually held by Stripe, not TR.

That's good to hear. I'm willing to wait to see if the major concerns (information density, blinding white background) are fixed, but want to stop the auto-renewal until this happens. The social media integration also pisses me off. If TR is going to do that, it should use passive links without embedded scripts or images from facebook et al.

That there was no warning before the change is astounding.

Look on the bright side... it is less broken than the last Ars Technica site redesign was when they first tried to roll that out!

drfish wrote:

They are right, we've never stored it. The page is here: https://techreport.com/subscriptions/

Honestly though, I don't know what exactly subs mean right now. They are on my list in the first post as something I'm trying to get clarification on.

Thanks - that doesn't show any information about my current subscription, the payment method, or allow me to change it.

thedosbox wrote:

drfish wrote:

They are right, we've never stored it. The page is here: https://techreport.com/subscriptions/

Honestly though, I don't know what exactly subs mean right now. They are on my list in the first post as something I'm trying to get clarification on.

Thanks - that doesn't show any information about my current subscription, the payment method, or allow me to change it.

I'd check your email for the original receipt. Yes I know that isn't ideal but things are in flux.

I agree with the question about the facebook and other links.

Usually, those links exist as part of arrangements allowing tracking - obviously something undesirable, but probably ok for some if it allows revenue to support TR. My concern, given the indication that the site development is outsourced, is whether such revenue, if it exists, actually will go to TR.

I just edited my post above to say that I'm told the Stripe sub applet thingy will be back in place shortly.

Regarding the social media links. Yeah, I don't like it, but in the grand scheme that's not one I'm going to get worked up about. If that particular feature purports to help the site, I can deal with it.

Is there a quick way to get to the front page? Maybe something like at arstechnica.com where scrolling up a little reveals a menu on the top? The new site looks OK but all the white space with a lack of boxes/borders/whatever looks a bit jarring to my eyes. Maybe that's something one gets used to.

bitcat70 wrote:

Is there a quick way to get to the front page? Maybe something like at arstechnica.com where scrolling up a little reveals a menu on the top? The new site looks OK but all the white space with a lack of boxes/borders/whatever looks a bit jarring to my eyes. Maybe that's something one gets used to.

Top left of every single page. The TR logo links to the front page.

The new design is significantly worse than the old one, both on mobile and (especially) on the desktop.

Problems with the new design:
- Very low information density with constant scrolling, even on large desktop screens.
- Bland, all-white design without any aesthetics.
- Searching for old reviews and news is much harder.
- The layout of text and tables in reviews is worse than before.
- Harder to find the page that I want in reviews.
- Comments are much harder to navigate.

TR is my favorite tech website, but I am sure that I will visit the website less and less in the future if this design stays. It really makes the website that much worse.
Please bring back the old design.

Any idea where the Avatar's are for the front page? I'm almost positive I never used that picture here on TR. It looks like the one from disqus. Is there an external site linking usernames?

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Any idea where the Avatar's are for the front page? I'm almost positive I never used that picture here on TR. It looks like the one from disqus. Is there an external site linking usernames?

At least one seems to be from https://en.gravatar.com/. FWIW It goes look like disqus uses their service. Along with quite a few other sites/services.

Yeah that's the default way that Wordpress does avatars. You can override it in the theme if you want though.

What really sucks is the best review TR has had in a long time is getting lost in the complaints about the new UI.
Zak must have put in a ton of hours of testing in the last week and the article has all of 30 comments, with a decent chunk of those about the UI and not even mentioning the review itself.

I know it wasn't intended but this was really the absolute worst timing imaginable, and I fear the only people likely reading the review are the TR diehards.
A new major review on TR, with the quality we've become accustomed to should be a highlight moment.

I don't know how I'll feel after a week or two but right now I'm not happy with the redesign. As someone else said instead of focusing
on how the information is presented to maximize information provided this feels like an attempt to get more ads presented over the
information that brings me to the Tech Report. Now the site feels like just every other web site that I dislike.

Rand wrote:

Zak must have put in a ton of hours of testing in the last week and the article has all of 30 comments, with a decent chunk of those about the UI and not even mentioning the review itself.

Given the current comment format it's not like there's an easy way to have a discussion without clicking through lots of pages and a TON of scrolling anyway.

Indeed, this is probably the worst timing possible.

Maybe it's an opportunity to marry the article comments with the forum. A thread per article, mirroring from/to the article-view comments. Somehow implement extra fields in phpBB for votes and to link to parent comment.

BTW: There's still some URL strangeness in the forum. The pages' HTML canonical link explicitly specify port 443.

Well, everybody else has pretty much said everything there is too say, I really have nothing new too add. I agree with all the complaints.

This brings me back to when TR went with the "tan" option. Heh, there was a lot of outcry over that.

I'm sure that this has been said. It feels and acts like a mobile site. It's super annoying.

Rand wrote:

What really sucks is the best review TR has had in a long time is getting lost in the complaints about the new UI.
Zak must have put in a ton of hours of testing in the last week and the article has all of 30 comments, with a decent chunk of those about the UI and not even mentioning the review itself.

I know it wasn't intended but this was really the absolute worst timing imaginable, and I fear the only people likely reading the review are the TR diehards.
A new major review on TR, with the quality we've become accustomed to should be a highlight moment.

I don't think the problem is people's complaints about the redesign so much as it is that Zak's review is not the lead article, as it should be. In the old system, the rotation of recent articles at least brought the latest articles to the top periodically, which helped, but listing of the articles also allowed something new and great to be visibly listed. The new design places only the most recent "above-the-fold", as it were.

I think the choice of the lead article is a content matter that should be up to Dr Fish, Zak and the others, so that precisely this problem does not occur again.

Can't see comments in articles under current version of Chrome. Pushing the "Comments" button opens the "Leave A Reply" dialogue but still doesn't show comments.
No obvious place to log in.
Is it April 1st already?
Please make it go away.

Zach, A nicely done review! The 3900X is really an upgrade. I like you putting all the traces in a grid. Its easier to compare them; good idea. Can one say that one advantage of the chiplet architecture is that the fastest chiplets can be reserved for the high end CPU? It seems it must be that way when a CPU with more cores can clock higher than one with less cores. It lets AMD turn the paradigm on its head. Faster CPU’s are assembled with the faster chicklets. Period.

Request,
#1 is it possible that logging in to the forums would then work for the article comments.
#2 Will we be able to eventually edit comments (e.g. if one messed up a link).

The front page needs borders, a darker color option and denser information. Before I could hit the home page and see hot forum threads and latest news with out scrolling or clicking. Running a 4k monitor I have massive white borders on each side of the page, almost 1/3 border, 1/3 content, 1/3 border.

I'm terribly sorry. Having a fresh high-quality review of a highly anticipated product was a wonderful chance to win back eyeballs and help keep the lights on, and then the site swap snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

The old site really seemed superior in every single way, especially information density and distinctiveness. Were the site to stay this new way, I can't imagine renewing my gold subscription, and I'd probably gradually quit visiting here.

Besides fixing the utterly abysmal information density, getting comments right has to be a priority. Frankly, if TR's article comments were as badly done as Anandtech's or many other sites', whatever community ever formed here would have evaporated long ago as soon as review content started to thin out.

• Allowing people to see the conversation develop at a glance and see where they have something to say is vital. At least you aren't putting only a few comments to a page like AT etc.
• Default threaded reverse chronological sorting - not by the time the thread began but by most recent reply - keeps active conversations afloat rather than buried.
• Showing the score, username, and first line of each reply, then expanding to the full reply on click, allows you to have more of the conversation in view without being overwhelmed.
• The old site had fairly minimal threading indentation, and then I think it did something so if you clicked on a threaded comment which was too far off to the right it displayed it further left. The new site easily runs into
  th
  is
  p
  ro
  bl
  em
  
  where comments which are a few levels into the threading get wrapped along the right hand side at only a few characters wide.
  
  
• You need a user login for the comments rather than asking for 'name, email, website.' Otherwise you end up with any random dude posting as 'Colton Westrate.'
• Plus, asking people for their website and then linking their name to that website is a recipe for trouble (all the way from the mild distraction entailed up to spam/porn/illegal sites discovering they can simply flood your comment section and be credited by search engines for getting linked from TR).
• I don't want to see avatars in article comments. Period. It's not only a total waste of space in this very space constrained area (especially useless when many people won't bother replacing the dumb silhouette), it's also a way of ruining the level playing field.
• Allowing comment editing obviously depends on logins.
• Having the net score for each post rather than its total upthumbs and downthumbs was nice; that helped subtly nudge conversations towards quality rather than controversy without heavy-handed intervention. (Showing a post to have a net zero score doesn't stoke the commenter's ego or fire up their defensiveness the way displaying 50 upthumbs and 50 downthumbs does.)
• Past comments are borken. Tags don't work (look at any old page and see the broken url= and b../b etc), thumbs aren't there, etc.

All in all, if there's any way at all to go back to the old site, I'd encourage that. If not, since I can't see a single way in which the new site improves on the old, trying to replicate the old site in your new cms seems the way to go.

You see these things happen to other sites, but you never think they'll happen to yours...

I'm holding out hope that it can be fixed, as least in part. At least some of the issues are fairly trivial to fix.

Maybe we could abandon the site altogether and just be a phpbb forum. There are a number of thriving communities like this.

ARRRRRGGGGG just went looking for an older CPU review that is seriously broken on the new site. No way to show just CPU reviews that I can see.